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I just recovered from a HootSuite infection. I thought that by posting new content each day, hordes of new B2B corporate decision makers would find me. I watched and waited for my Klout score to skyrocket.

Boy, was I disappointed. The majority of new followers included yoga instructors, network marketers, and sundry dilettantes. I had fallen prey to CCM—Content Creation Madness. Given the incessant social media frenzy, I suspect I'm not the first.

While the plethora of content distribution once excited me, I now realize that my content was landing in the data dumpster. I lacked a critical ingredient: a content marketing strategy. Thankfully, I am regaining my footing on the road to content creation recovery.

The first antidote was for me to fully understand content marketing strategy and its key components. According to marketing agency Tomorrow People, "content marketing is the approach of fitting your content within a structured and measurable process to create better results in attracting leads and transforming them into customers—and increasing revenue." Effective content strategists do five things very well:

They develop tools that help them constantly listen to their market, (such as SearchMetrics and Google Insights), and articulate their ideal customer profiles (aka buyer personas). This allows them to clearly define their customers' buying process.

They create content for each stage of their buying process (awareness, consideration, and decision). Content appears in many forms, ranging from short videos to live seminars, infographics, and white papers.

They foster audience participation—the right audiences at the right time in the right channels (landing pages, LinkedIn, social media, live forums, etc.) to foster discussion around relevant topics.

They build a solid lead management, lead scoring, and lead nurturing platform to turn ideas into discussions, discussions into leads, and leads into customers. Eloqua, Hubspot (for small businesses), and Marketo provide platforms to streamline these processes.

They constantly expand their audience by continuously tracking results.

How do you know when you're about to contract CCM, and your strategy is amiss? Tim Hill, President of Global Marketing for Blackboard, a technology solutions provider for the education market, shares their experiences (and their mistakes).

Your content is downright boring. According to Hill, "I was seeing a lot of talk about us (in many cases, we were leading with it)—who we are, what we can do—and not enough on our customer’s problems: student progression and academic outcomes."

You're growing rapidly. Since 2007, Blackboard has managed 12 acquisitions and one merger.

Ineluctable proliferation of content. Hill stated that "with more people saying more things in more places, Blackboard marketers now had a broader mission and more competition for readers’ attention."

You let the sales organization dictate your content strategy. You know you're in trouble when the sales reps have the power to request a "special" white paper or presentation, and tell you it's essential to closing their next big deal.

Hill, recalling his team's bout with CCM, said his marketing team grabbed the proverbial content bull by the horns and made it their mission to eliminate boring, duplicate, and irrelevant content.

The first step was to ensure they established clear alignment with sales before undertaking any content-related project. By building a stronger bond with sales, his marketing team became more involved in customer conversations and discovered a recurring sales theme: the "active learner."

Blackboard then created a one-page worksheet to help teams build content that would establish themselves as thought leaders around the needs of active learners. This worksheet became the de facto filter to help teams be more effective content creators.

Instead of asking "what do we need to tell our prospective customers?," his team is asking "how can we help our customers effectively deploy digital content, or build their brand using mobile technology by sharing effective practices we see in the field?"

Blackboard's content strategy is a work in progress; however, the early signs are encouraging. "We more than tripled our following on Twitter and Facebook in the past 6 months. And we created so much buzz on Twitter at our annual user conference that we trended nationally twice in the span of 3 days with over 20,000 tweets about the experience."

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Lisa is the Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth and the founder of Marketing Leaders of DC. She has helped B2B companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, and BMC Software grow customer mindshare and market share. Lisa is also a sought-after speaker, and is the author of EnergizeGrowth NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company. Visit www.energizegrowth.com to download a free sample chapter through EnergizeNews and follow Lisa on twitter.